How 9/11 Changed Architecture

People walk past construction at the site of the World Trade Center site in New York, New York, USA, on 09 September 2011. Sunday will mark the ten year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Even beyond the Freedom Tower and new Trade Center buildings rising out of the ground, Lower Manhattan has changed dramatically since September 11. The block in front of the Stock Exchange is emptier, but Wall Street is more crowded. While bollards and bomb-proofing schemes abound, the biggest architectural changes in the Financial District over the last ten years weren’t caused by the War on Terror.

Certainly, security concerns reshaped the neighborhood. In the initial years after September 11, government buildings got the most visible alterations. The Federal Building was surrounded by concrete barriers, its driveway guarded against truck bombs by elevated steel gates, guards, and mirror-scope examinations of the undersides of vehicles. The heavy fortifications of Jersey barriers and concrete planters around public buildings contrasted with private buildings: the most prominent skyscraper on Wall Street at the time was defended by two unarmed security guards, their back to a huge glass wall and an open atrium at the base of the tower. Delivery trucks pulled up next to the building, double parking at will.

A decade later, however, private property owners are on board too, and stylish “bollards”—the architectural term for those stumpy posts set into the sidewalk to stop trucks from driving through the front door of a building—surround buildings from the World Financial Center to the Upper West Side’s Jewish Community Center.

Likewise, building has changed. The shortcomings of the World Trade Center’s design come to mind whenever I see a new building rising: before the façade goes on, there are bigger steel beams, more cross-bracing, and thick concrete walls at the base. The murmuring irony, of course, is that changes to the New York City building code still don’t apply to the towers now being built at the World Trade Center site under the Port Authority’s own rules.

But the biggest changes are on Wall Street, where it seems that half the office buildings have become residential condominiums. After September 11 businesses shuttered or moved, and vacancy rates soared. Government support (through Liberty Bonds and the city’s Residential Grant Program) encouraged the conversion of commercial offices to luxury apartments. A generation of bankers and traders have decided Lower Manhattan is a neighborhood in which to live as well as work. According to the city, two-thirds of Lower Manhattan’s 25,000 new residents live in converted offices.

Even the famous low-rise JP Morgan Building at the corner of Wall and Broad Street is now part of a condo designed by Philippe Starck. This was the site of the earlier Financial District bombing, when a horse-drawn cart was allegedly detonated by Italian anarchists on September 16, 1902. (The 91st anniversary is next week.)

In addition to the influx of new residents, there has been a stylistic shift in Lower Manhattan. Battery Park City famous for requiring designers use brick, stone, and cast iron details to mimic the style of Gramercy Park or West End Avenue. This was a source of much derision by postmodern architectural critics, who believed that this deception-by-historical-façade was inextricable from Battery Park City’s identity.

The critics turned out to be wrong. The brick and granite was only window dressing, and today it has been stripped from Battery Park City’s newest buildings. First, the environmentally prominent Solaire apartment tower replaced bricks with solar panels. Today, office buildings shimmer in glass and steel, in blatant disregard for the design standards mandated for decades in Battery Park City.

The modernist style is spreading. From the shimmering new towers that frame Broadway uptown, to condos in Brooklyn and Queens, historicist flourishes are out, right-angled steel and glass modernism is in. What does the new modernism mean?

While postmodern buildings looked backwards, albeit in a selective way, the current round of landmark buildings don’t dwell on history. When Battery Park City was first being built on landfill from the original World Trade Center excavation, a sympathetic reporter argued that while critics lambasted the fake history being lacquered onto new buildings, “What’s exciting about this landfill is that history is just beginning.” Critics and boosters alike imagined history as nothing but a charming addition to the neighborhood. The history Battery Park City gained from being across the street from the Trade Center suggests otherwise.

But the shift from historicism to modernism in Lower Manhattan is more than a turn away from the past. Neo-modernism certainly doesn’t maintain the progressive social program of the original European masters, who imagined better living for the masses through high rises with modern amenities. To the contrary, the most prominent exemplar of the new modernism is the Goldman Sachs World Headquarters in Battery Park City. Hardly a promise of accessibility to the masses, the Goldman building exudes a sense that the firm is untouchable: Floor-to-ceiling glass starting at the ground floor leaves Goldman highly visible but inaccessible, as the landmark mural by Julie Mehretu makes clear, tantalizing viewers from the outside, but unreachable in a private part of the entrance lobby. It is a confidence reflected in the similarly modernist Richard Meier building on Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza that has become notorious for its exhibitionist lifestyle: you can see us in flagrante, but we still won’t pay any price for our transgressions. That overweening self-confidence is a recent development among the city’s elites. Goldman’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s eventual hiring of a criminal defense attorney last month suggests the building represents not confidence, but hubris.

That willingness to flaunt it, blatantly, is borne of the power of New York’s gentrification. It’s unimaginable that Meier would have built his Grand Army Plaza building in 1970s Brooklyn, for instance.

Nor, for that matter, would JP Morgan himself have embraced the diaphanous glassiness of Goldman’s contemporary counterpart to his early-twentieth century bank. Morgan, after all, proudly left the bomb blast’s pockmarks in the stone façade exposed, supposedly to show how impenetrable the House of Morgan was.

Morgan built 23 Wall Street to symbolize unassailable stability. Goldman’s new style suggests a blithe belief in their own noble immunity. In this way Morgan and Goldman’s images are radically opposed. At first we couldn’t forget September 11. Over the decade that followed, however, we tried to forget the difficult lessons history taught. Today, we’re all paying the price.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.